Cyprus has always kept cats, like the Near East has long had bronze. Lately, we've seen Questions about when real bronzes actually got to southeast Europe - the classical Greece and maybe Cyrenaica. We're hearing similar about the cat. Some claim that the Greeks preferred polecats, that is the semidomestic ferret. Aristotle, for one, knew of tamed mustelids; it is probably the ferret, useful for rabbit-riddance.
Herodotus knew the cat well-enough to describe feline sex-politics where the cat isn't fully domestic, accurately as far as I know (it matches how male lions treat, say, cheetah cubs). He saved that for his account of Bubastis in Egypt. Some conclude he didn't see many cats in Greece. More likely, he just didn't like 'em: cats shared the reputation of mustelids, that they attacked birds.
The claim "yes ferret no cat" somewhat fails to account for the appearance of cats (and maybe the domestic rooster) in Etruscan grave-frescoes. Certainly as chickens and other fowl were being kept in coops, those keepers didn't want cats anymore than mustelids. Look what a pest the mongoose has become in Barbados.
Anyway: Sardinian cats were introduced, from lybica of course, around the Iron Age. The same study has that other cats extant in Europe today, besides imports like Milo's beloved Bengal, came later and separately.
To me this looks like feral cats roamed cities in Iron Age Europe but were not much beloved there. They were treated more as pests than as friends. It may have been the Hellenistic Era, when Egypt was integrated with the Greek and (increasingly) Roman world, that increasingly-urban Europeans acquired interest in cats as companions. Which cats they imported, rather than simply grabbing cats off their own streets.
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